Harvestman

Subject: Howdy from south Texas! Location: A very rural part of Bexar county in south central Texas September 28, 2012 5:07 pm Howdy, bugman! This is a cool site, my daughters and I just had a fun time browsing through…. By any chance do y’all recognize this bug? My 9 year old assures me she’s a spider because she has 8 legs. We just took the picture today, September 28th. This ”spider” has been hanging out on our bug-covered south Texas porch for about 2 days…no evidence of a web anywhere! Thanks in advance, we’re going nuts trying to figure out what we’re looking at here! Signature: South Texas dad

Harvestman

Dear South Texas dad, Your daughter was astute to count the legs, but this is not a Spider. It is a Harvestman or Daddy-Long-Legs in the order Opiliones. Harvestmen and Spiders are both Arachnids. The markings on this individual are quite distinctive, yet we could not find a match on BugGuide. We do have a matching image of a Harvestman from Wimberly, Texas in our own archive, but we never identified the species. Harvestmen lack venom and they are perfectly harmless.

Hi Daniel, thanks so much for writing us back with that amazing information! My daughter was thrilled to get your compliment, too 🙂 Wimberly is just up the road from us so I imagine the picture in the link you sent us is probably a close relative of our harvestman..and we are all glad to know she’s harmless! Thanks again 🙂